#0 - March 12, 2009, 11:25 p.m.
Setting the Glory of the Raider achievements up and dangling a 310% mount in front of the raiding population, then yanking it with marginal notice is wretched PR. It isn't about "trivializing" the achievement - it IS about trivializing the effort that the people who will come up short put in to earning the drakes.
We get it - Ulduar gear will make Glory of the Raider easier - it won't make it a faceroll (if it does, you've botched the gear step from 7 to 8). But, it isn't fair to the poor, selfless hardcore guilds that blew threw your expansion content like tissue paper if every scrub in the game got the same reward but with better gear.
Still, there are a dozen better ways to handle that issue than just yanking the drakes. Off the top of my head, here are two:
- Include an additional achievement that disregards gear - a la final boss of Occulus. If you complete Glory pre-3.1, you get the drake without doing the extra achievement, and you get a title. If you can't, you are penalized by having to do additional work that you can't breeze through with Ulduar gear and you miss the public bragging rights of the title.
- Mix in one or two Ulduar achievements with Glory of the Raider, once again to avoid handing the drake off to the latecomers. Same rationale as above.
Why are these two suggestions vastly superior alternatives to yanking the Black and the Plagued drakes since, after all, there will be new drakes to earn? Because they don't leave the people who missed Glory of the Raider by one or two achievements with the feeling that they busted their collective ass for nothing, and allow them to avoid the rage-inducing frustration of having to start all the way from scratch (on harder content no less).
Honest to God guys, you have got to start giving more thought to the ramifications of your decisions, because going based on your feelings (i.e. "we felt that...") has left you with a lot of explaining to do.
